Automation is not new, but its use in cloud computing is recent. The idea is to automate tasks that have been traditionally carried out by humans; for example, self-healing a saturated compute server by automatically restarting it on a cloud provider. Or restricting the overuse of some expensive cloud service by finops automation, or having security automation defend against a cloud-borne breach attempt that happens at 3:00 a.m.
The truth is I’ve preached the role of automation in cloud computing for many years now, but I’ve noticed a reluctance to set up and leverage automation within cloud deployments. This seems to be a systemic problem that could lead to suboptimized cloud deployments, missing an opportunity to have more reliable, more secure, and more trackable cloud operations.